Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women worldwide. In the Czech Republic, almost 6000 women of all ages are diagnosed with breast cancer each year. Despite the high incidence of the disease, more and more patients can be successfully treated thanks to ongoing improvements in diagnosis and treatment methods. Targeted therapies are known to affect cancer cells in a selective manner and to stop tumour growth, raising hopes for even more successful treatments of many types of cancer, including breast cancer.

The Breast registry focuses on the collection of epidemiological and clinical data on breast cancer patients treated with targeted therapies in the Czech Republic.

Over the last few years, the number of targeted therapies for breast cancer has gradually risen, and so has the number of Czech drug registries which have been launched to monitor treatment of breast cancer with individual targeted drugs; namely, Herceptin, Lapatinib and Avastin (part of the registry dealing with breast cancer), which monitored treatment with trastuzumab (Herceptin®), lapatinib (Tyverb®), bevacizumab (Avastin®), and everolimus (Afinitor®), respectively. The Board of the Czech Society for Oncology has therefore agreed to solve this complicated situation by creating a new unified registry which would integrate all data collected so far within original registries. If a new drug is approved by health care payers for targeted breast cancer treatment, it can be easily integrated into the Breast registry.

Data collected previously in the above-mentioned registries have been transferred into the Breast registry. This procedure has eliminated the necessity of entering data on treatment of any given breast cancer patient into several different registries; moreover, coherent and well-arranged information has been obtained on the overall treatment of that patient, the potential sequence of targeted therapies, and the patient's response to treatment. The new project has therefore not only improved the quality of collected data, but also simplified the work for registry users. Apart from providing epidemiological characteristics of breast cancer patients, the registry also enables researchers to assess risk factors on patients' survival and to analyze adverse effects. The registry can also be used to make pharmacoeconomic assessments such as planning costs for cancer therapy. The project was initiated in April 2011 at the Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses of the Masaryk University (IBA MU) and has continued at the Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses Ltd (IBA Ltd), a university company.

Primary objectives of the project:

monitoring the overall number of breast cancer patients in the Czech Republic treated with trastuzumab, lapatinib, bevacizumab and everolimus,

assessment of safety of targeted therapies,

assessment of effectiveness of targeted therapies and of applied treatment regimens.

Secondary objectives of the project:

analysis of patients' survival in relation to monitored clinical factors,

analysis of patient cohort treated with targeted therapies in relation to Czech reference population data.